Silent Hill: Shepherd of Wolves
by cosettebird
Summary: Vasilisa Sokolovskaya, a resident of the town, has lost a loved one in more ways than one. OC. Gen. Rated for violence.
1. A Note

A/N: Silent Hill doesn't belong to me. Just a note: this story takes place on November 7th, 1993.

It started, as most things do, with a letter.

Or a note, rather, not a letter, scrawled on a sheet of lined paper and left on the counter next to the telephone. It said:

"Dear Vasya I will be home late from work today. Please do not be worried. Love Yuri."

That was it. It was a perfectly normal note, and Vasilisa had gone about her day without thinking of it once. She ate breakfast, went to work, came home, said hello to the lady who lived in the apartment next-door, ate leftovers, went to class, came home, read a book, and finally tumbled into bed. All in all, a perfectly normal day.

The next morning, when Vasilisa awoke, the apartment was empty and the note was still sitting on the counter next to the telephone. The only dishes in the sink were her own, and her father's bed was still neatly made, hospital corners and all. She felt a little twinge of worry but managed to rationalize - perhaps he had forgotten to throw away the note. Perhaps he had done his dishes already. Perhaps he had made his bed before he left for the mines. Perhaps he had left early to grab breakfast at the diner down the street.

Vasilisa showered and dressed - button-up shirt, skirt, nothing special. She wasn't extraordinarily attractive, but she wasn't extraordinarily unattractive either. She was merely average. While her father fit the Russkie stereotype to a T with his big burly build and his general gloominess and his miserably cold grey eyes, Vasilisa looked and acted nothing like the devilish Russian femme fatales that pranced around on the television. She was short, thin, and relatively flat-chested; her hair was light brown, not quite light enough to be called blonde, wavy but not wavy enough to be called curly. That morning she braided that wavy brown hair while it was still wet and wrapped a threadbare towel around her shoulders to keep her shirt from getting damp. The apartment was chilly and her hair felt like ice against her skull. The dark pseudo-wood flooring that the whole apartment was panelled in was unpleasantly and unusually cold too - only October and already everything was starting to feel really cold. It was Maine autumn cold though, not Russian autumn cold, which was a blessing.

Next door, Mrs. Upton was carrying a pink bakery box with a newspaper balanced precariously on top and fishing in the pocket of her housedress for her keys. "Hello, dear," she said, still focused on extricating her keys.

"Hi, Mrs. Upton. Have you seen my dad around lately?"

Mrs. Upton found her keys. "No, I haven't," she said as she unlocked her door. "Is there a problem?"

"I-I . . . don't know. He didn't come home from work last night. You haven't heard anything about any mine accidents, have you?" Her voice caught on the last sentence.

"Well, I haven't heard anything. I'm sure he's fine. If he's not back in a couple of days, you can file a police report." She turned and offered Vasilisa a small smile. "Just holler if you need anything, dear."

"Okay, I will."

She never did.

. . .

Vasilisa dreampt of the mines.

They were a labyrinth, a house, a network of veins and arteries and capillaries that fed the towns of Brahms, Shepherd's Glen, and Silent Hill.

They were old, very old, almost as old as Silent Hill itself.

She had never seen them, but she could imagine them - black and enormous and miserably cold, black as night, black as the coal that her father and the miners brought up from their depths, black as the very bottom of Toluca Lake, cold as hell, cold as the prisons in Siberia, and so vast that when she was little she thought they crossed the whole earth. How easy it would be to get lost in those tunnels, in those hallways, how difficult it would be watch all of that blackness close in on you and suffocate you and swallow you whole, how difficult it would be to know that you would die alone and your flesh and your eyes and your brain and your bloody bones would be eaten up by the water and worms. Two-hundred and thirty-two sets of bones rotting in the dark, soon to be joined by the two-hundred and thirty-third set . . .

Vasilisa awoke and realized that she was staring at the white ceiling of the apartment.

_"Please do not be worried."_

Surely if Yuri had been lost, one of his fellow miners would have spoken to her.

_What if they didn't notice?_

They had radios. Surely . . .

She eased herself up. Her hair and skin and nightclothes were sticky-damp with sweat but her mouth was dry and tasted like sawdust. Dreams, she told herself, were just the day's thoughts and worries distilled and bottled up by the mind. And dreams . . . dreams couldn't foretell the future.

_"Please do not be worried."_

It had been seventy-two hours. She would go to the police station today and file a Missing Persons Report, and everything would be just fine. She kicked the blankets away from her legs and stood, the fold-out couch she slept on creaking as she did so. The apartment was dim, despite the fact that the curtains were open, and very quiet. The clock on the microwave said that it was seven-thirty in the morning, although for some reason it felt much earlier. Vasilisa stared blearily at the refrigerator, wondering if she ought to eat anything. Her stomach flip-flopped at the very idea of food, and thus she decided against it. She showered instead, but the hot water ran out early. She shut it off as quickly as she could, but the damage had been done and she was left dripping and shivering in a deathly cold, colourless bathroom. Still, she braided her hair and dressed herself in another blouse and skirt, determined to look presentable for the police if nothing else. It was nice to have clean hair and clothes, and after about half-an-hour her stomach had stopped flip-flopping enough for her to eat two pieces of dry toast.

The note was still sitting on the counter. Vasilisa had looked at it several more times over the past few days, checking and double-checking, making sure that it said what she thought it said and that the writing hadn't been spirited off the page. It never changed, although she never really expected it too. After putting on her raincoat and shoes, she went to fetch it, assuming that the police would want to see it. The note was still there with its message unchanged, but what sat beside it made Vasilisa's stomach lurch.

It was Yuri's two-way radio.

A sudden coldness crawled up Vasilisa's spine, all of the way up her back and into her skull. Her breath caught in her throat; the kitchenette blurred and the floor fell away from her feet. She blinked, caught herself, and found herself looking at her perfectly normal kitchenette with the slightly odd note and extremely odd radio. It had not been there before this morning, she was sure of it. After class? No, it had not been there yesterday evening either. At night, maybe . . . she didn't even want to consider it. It had to be a joke, a cruel, cruel practical joke. It had to be a trick. There was no other explanation. Gaslighting, that was what they called it. Driving her mad . . .

Vasilisa swallowed and glanced across the room towards Yuri's bedroom. The door was open wide, and the bed inside was still neatly made.

Something told her to take the radio to the police. She did - the black plastic was cool - not that she expected anything else. Her skin crawled. She then pocketed the note, which was much more comforting, locked the apartment up, and left.

The radio bumped against her hip with every step she took – it seemed that it didn't want to be forgotten. It was silent, which Vasilisa supposed was a good thing. Maybe. The whole of Blue Creek Apartments was quiet, deathly so, and she would have welcomed some human voices. Usually somebody was out and about at this time of day. She ought to have at least heard voices (living ones) if nothing else. The walls were thin enough that people in the apartments could be heard by people in the halls. But there was nothing, nobody, no sound but her own footsteps. It was almost as if everyone had -

Her hand went to her pocket, searching for her note. Just to make sure it was there (it was). Weak light dripped through the window at the end of the hall, spilling out over the windowsill and across the floor. It was overcast outside and freezing cold inside; her breath came out in little white clouds even though it couldn't have possibly been that cold inside. Strange, very strange. Perhaps the heater had gone out. If that was the case, then somebody would be downstairs bitching at the super. But there was nothing - no voices, no sound, no -

The radio shrieked and Vasilisa's heart nearly stopped. She fumbled in her pocket for it, withdrawing it just as the dreadful shrieking quieted to a low buzz. She listened intently, waiting for a voice. And then, finally through the static - numbers. Someone - a young-sounding woman, she thought - was counting, but not in English. She was counting - slowly, deliberately, enunciating each letter - in Russian. One, two, three, four - she took a deep, shaky breath - five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. A pause, another deep, rattling breath. In English – "The message will not repeat. Please listen. Thank you."

It was her own voice.

A long pause, and then a repetition of the message, this time in Russian. What was she – if was her – saying about the message repeating? It made no sense – not that any of this made any sense. And then - no more words, just the crackle of static.

Vasilisa stood, clutching the radio, staring wide-eyed, her knuckles white and her face whiter. Just when she was sure that there wasn't going to be anything else, the radio then gave another ear-piercing wail, and Vasilisa nearly dropped the damn thing. She suppressed a giggle - this whole situation stuck her as oddly funny. A voice burst through the static - not her own, thankfully. It was her father's.

Her heart lept.

"Vasya," he said. He sounded harried, out of breath. In Russian: "Malyshka, please listen." She hadn't heard that name in a long, long time.

"Papa! Can you hear me?"

He didn't seem to hear. There was an edge to his voice, a strangeness that she couldn't quite put her finger on but didn't like at all. He coughed and said "If you can hear me, know that I'm okay. I'm safe. Everything will be all right. I love you so much. _So much._" His voice cut out as abruptly as it had come in and was replaced with the crackle of static.

He was alive. If nothing else, he was alive. He was a terrible liar - something was wrong, but he was _alive_, and that was what mattered. She tucked the radio back into her pocket, her heart a little lighter. Of course, she had no idea where he was and there was still the question of where the radio had come from and where everybody else was, but even that seemed a little less troublesome now.

She continued, her steps a little higher and her pace a little brisker. Blue Creek Apartments was small, only three stories tall, and thus had no elevator. It had little stairs tucked away in a dark stairwell, which she took. The stairwell smelled wet and mildewy - not that the whole building didn't smell wet and mildewy, the stairwell just smelled more so. The staircase that led to the third floor was blocked off; a crumpled piece of paper explained that it was unfit for human habitation. A corner of the roof had fallen in last winter, and while that had long since been patched up, some water had seeped into the walls and provided a nice safe place for black mold to grow. Why the lower two floors hadn't been evacuated, Vasilisa didn't know, but the third floor had been blocked off and its residents evacuated. Yuri, of course, spent several months grumbling to himself about how he'd left the Soviet Union to escape this _govno_. The dampness aggravated his perpetual cough, so she supposed he had more of a reason to complain about it than she did.

Even the lobby of the building was empty and painfully quiet. Maybe it was just the poor lighting, but everything looked worn and weary and faded. The colours were vaguely washed out, the blues were nearly grey. The heating wasn't on at all, and neither were lights, even though outside it was dark and heavily overcast. Vasilisa's skin prickled, but she didn't know why - this was her home and had been since they'd moved here. Somehow though, something was -

The radio hissed and Vasilisa took out of her pocket. She didn't expect another message from her father, but she certainly _hoped _for it. There were, however, no voices at all this time. She considered smacking it - maybe some good old percussive maintenance would make it shut up - but something sent her stumbling to the ground before she could so much as raise her hand.

She yelped and shot back up, clutching the still-shrieking radio. A tall and impossibly thin man – or not, it barely looked human – stood before her, rocking slightly on splayed, bony feet, cloaked in black moth-wings. His proportions were not that of a human man's; his legs were extraordinarily long and thin as matchsticks, only paper-white skin stretched over bone - he had nothing between those stick legs and no nose (not even nostrils). He had eyes, black, beady, ratlike things, set wide and low on his hairless white head – his mouth was wide and leering and the colour of fat red snowberries. He took a step – his gait was awkward, almost a limp – and then another, twitching madly, grinning widely. Impossibly widely -- it looked less like a mouth and more like a big crescent-shaped hole that somebody had carved in a white pumpkin, only with big teeth that looked like bleached bone needles inside. Vasilisa danced around it (if nothing else, she was faster than it), searching for something, anything, that she could use to defend herself or escape or somehow otherwise save herself.

There was something - a gift from God. Or so it seemed. There was a huge hunting rifle on the desk, sitting on top of the papers and the junk. Vasilisa didn't know how to shoot, but she'd either figure it out somehow or end up just bludgeoning the moth-thing to death with its butt. She darted behind the desk and grabbed ahold of it, the wood and metal peculiarly warm and familiar in her hands. She took aim as best she could, poked at it and then pulled the trigger back once, twice, three times. It bucked in her hands and she stumbled backwards and slammed against the wall.

The moth-thing, however, stopped grinning. There was a swath of dripping red on his chest, impossibly brilliant against his black, crumpled wings. He swayed, and then collapsed collapsed fully like a house in a hurricane, blood puddling around him, soaking his papery wings and spilling across the blue linoleum.

When it had lain there for a while with not so much as a twitch, Vasilisa stood shakily, still holding the rifle like it was her last salvation, her ears ringing. The adrenaline rush had worn off; her legs felt wobbly. The radio, which had fallen to the floor in the confusion, was quiet. The moth-thing too was quiet. Vasilisa turned it over with the end of her rifle and kicked it savagely in the head, jerking back in disgust as she felt its skull crack beneath her trainer. Something was painted in scarlet on its wings - how she had not noticed before, she didn't know.

On its wings was an insignia of some kind, a complicated trinity-within-a-circle-within-a-circle marking interlaced with runes and markings that appeared to have been painted with a careful hand. Vasilisa had seen it before, although she couldn't remember where. It was a religious insignia, she remembered, but no more. A thought crossed her mind - maybe the moth-thing was like a Golem, and this was like the name of God. Another God, obviously, but - no, that was silly. Then again, something like this ought not have existed at all . . .

As if Vasilisa needed yet another reason to go the police. Maybe she ought to skip the police altogether and just check herself into Brookhaven, she thought. She was having an exceptionally vivid nightmare, or she was hallucinating. If the latter was true, she hoped to God that the thing she had killed wasn't . . . wasn't a real person.

Vasilisa turned and retched.


	2. The Kikimora and Her House

Whatever the thing was, as soon as she turned around it was gone. No corpse, no blood: the blue linoleum was clean, and it was as if it had never existed. Even the blood on the sole of her shoe was gone.

There was, however, a scrap of paper where the body had been. Vasilisa reached out gingerly and took it, her hand shaking like a dry leaf. Somehow - something - she couldn't even begin to explain. The paper was thick and stiff, not plain typing paper but something heavier, maybe cardstock. On the front was a miniature version of the insignia that had been on the moth-thing's back. The insignia wasn't made of paint, as she had first thought - no, it was something else. Not blood; it was too red. And who on earth would paint such an elaborate thing in blood? It made her head ache, and a thought, unbidden, came to her -

Like something's groping around in my skull.

A man, gone, lost somewhere - how did she know that?

She turned it over and found that the back was blank - who had made the thing? She wondered if she ought to take it with her. It seemed, for some reason, wrong to leave it, but she didn't want that sign anywhere near her. Superstition, she told herself, but she dropped the card on the floor and went to get her radio and gun. She was definitely going to have to do something about the latter - she didn't know how to reload it, and she didn't know how many shots it even held. Or what the correct terminology was, for that matter. It had her fingerprints all over it, so she couldn't just leave it, but . . .

And what if something else appeared?

She frowned and with one hand held the rifle, and with the other, the radio, which was still silent and cool. Surely someone was out there - there would be help.

Surely.

Outside, the greyish-bluish mist was so heavy that Vasilisa found herself struggling for a full breath; the mist felt like a fist, one whose skin was damp and grey and clammy with prolonged illness. She could see the town and the trees rising up from the never-ending greyness, but it was as if she was looking at the world through thick glass - everything was surreally blurry and seemed to be somehow out of perspective. Everything was dark and shuttered, signs turned to closed. There were no cars and no people in the street, and while she obviously wasn't able to see inside the buildings, she had a feeling that they were all empty too. The fog sucked all of the colour from the place: Silent Hill was and had always been a very grey-and-red-and-green town, all concrete and red brick with kitschy green

shutters and scattered shrubs and trees bent by weather and time, but today it seemed pale and desaturated, as if someone had run the whole town through the washing-machine too many times. Everything was darker too, the roads and buildings and foliage blackened by the pervasive wetness. True to its name, the town was as quiet as a snow-covered field in the middle of nowhere, save a mournful whooping foghorn that sounded very far away. No birds, no dogs, no people, no wind, just a nothingness so complete Vasilisa wanted to scream just to break it.

She hummed a few lines of some folk song she had heard a long time ago, and while the lyrics were lost to her, she remembered the tune. Her voice was weak and tremulous - it was almost more unsettling than the empty silence, so she stopped. If nothing else, the police station wasn't very far - right around the corner, across Katz Street and down Neely, right next to some seedy bar she had forgotten the name of. There had been a presentation in elementary school once, she remembered, given by the police, something about "stranger danger" or the like. She had been only nine then, and her English had been so poor that the policeman's words sounded like impenetrable gibberish. Nine-year-old Vasilisa did catch the directions he gave though, and for some reason she had not

forgotten them twelve years later: right-right-down.

The town was no longer beautiful. It looked so lonely and so tired, rising like a ghost in the fog, like Pripyat. It was beginning to rain a little and the wind was picking up, scattering dry leaves across the pavement, stirring up scraps of paper and dust. The sky was flat and endless and the colour of gun-metal. Maybe - and she laughed at this - this really was Pripyat or something like it and some nuclear reactor had blown its top. As if such a tiny town would even have a nuclear reactor! This was a dream, and she didn't want -

All alone in the centre of the street was a little girl. She had not been there before -

Vasilisa stopped but the girl beckoned her forward. She was smiling softly, not at all maliciously. Vasilisa, with caution, drew closer and saw that she was also vaguely blurred, somehow intangible-looking - a ghost? A spirit? She couldn't have been more than seven or eight and was quite pretty. Her hair was deep black and her eyes dark brown, her skin pale but rosy; her clothes, a blue-checked jumper-dress with a pink sweater underneath, seemed oddly outdated but were clean. She appeared to well-cared for and happy - maybe? She was smiling still. It was a smile that was too old for such a little girl. She smiled as if she knew something Vasilisa didn't.

"Sweetheart?" said Vasilisa. Her voice sounded funny. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she said. "Are you?"

Vasilisa nodded, puzzled. "Oh - yes. Are you all alone? Do you have a mom or dad?"

"I'm looking for my daddy."

"Me . . . me too." Vasilisa took a step forward; the girl took a step forward as she did so. A perfect mirror. "I'm going to the police station. D'you want to come?"

"No, I'll be okay."

"I can't just leave you, sweetheart - it isn't safe out here."

"I know." She smiled. It was almost motherly. "I saw what you saw in Blue Creek."

Vasilisa opened her mouth to say something and found herself at a loss.

"Don't worry," said the girl. "It will be okay."

"What do you mean?"

She shrugged and her smile faded. "This town is much bigger than I am. I'm not what I used to be - I can't help you. But it will be okay, even if you die."

How reassuring. Vasilisa had given up trying to make sense of everything. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Cheryl," said the girl after a moment of thought. "I have a lot of names."

"Nice to meet you, Cheryl," Vasilisa said and found herself lying flat on her back on something frigid and hard and staring up at a flat sky the colour of gunmetal.

. . . .

It was such a departure from the reality she had previously existed in that she sat up and gasped. Her head spun and her limbs felt stiff and leaden, and she stood, stamping her feet in an attempt to get the ache out of them.

"What?" she said. "What?" She half-expected somebody to answer, maybe the god-damned Cheshire Cat. But, of course, there was nothing.

Vasilisa was in the same part of town that she had collapsed in, a small consolation. As for the time, well, she couldn't tell. It had snowed, she knew that - inches and inches of the stuff had fallen! The buildings were cloaked in a hard grey-white, their signs nearly illegible. Spindly black evergreens and the decidedly blacker skeletons of deciduous trees stretched to a blank, grey sky. The road was nigh indistinguishable from the buildings or, for that matter, the sky, and the snow that covered it was unmarred by car tracks or animal tracks or people tracks. The only sound was the sound of her blood in her ears - a dull, hollow, roar, the kind of sound that creeps in only when everything else is very, very quiet. The air was still. The world was still. Oddly enough, she was a bit chilly but not cold. Her legs

were bare below the knees - she ought have been literally freezing, but she for whatever reason, she wasn't.

How long had she slept? There was no snow on her. It was - or had been - early November when she collapsed, which was a bit early for snow but not terribly unusual. But this . . . this was much too much snow for late November or even December, let alone early November. For all she knew, she had died.

She had nowhere to go. The police station was surely closed - was anything else open? The shops and homes that lined the street were all dark and hollow, empty of spirit and of occupants. She had to get out of the cold; despite her lack of feeling, standing out in thick, deep snow in canvas tennis shoes and a skirt and a thin raincoat couldn't have possibly been good for her. Besides, walking was difficult as her legs sunk into the drifts with every step. Maybe she could find some snowshoes somewhere - not that she could walk in them, but she could learn. Just as she was about to make the arduous trek back to the sidewalk, she remembered something - her rifle! It was nowhere to be found, and had probably been buried beneath the snow. Vasilisa didn't feel much like looking for it, but she

wanted something to hold on to, if nothing else. Who knew what could appear.

Vasilisa dropped to her knees and dug. She must have looked ridiculous, she thought, as she was digging like a little puppy, scooping up handfuls of snow with her bare hands and tossing it behind her. Eventually, her hands hit metal instead of snow and she laughed almost giddily. She pulled the rifle from the snow and continued, clutching at the rifle as a means of support. The coldness of the air, which again she did not feel, was making it difficult to breathe. Maybe, she thought, she wasn't

dead but dying. She remembered reading somewhere that death by hypothermia was actually almost pleasant, and that those who were dying of it actually felt quite warm and comfortable as they departed. But her mind was sharp and clear as ice.

Every single shop was locked. She supposed that she could break one of the picture-windows, but some civilized part of her mind noted that that would be illegal, so she continued along the strip, trying to open a door, any damn door - at last she found one. The front door of Ridgeview High School was unlocked. Such a stroke of luck. She pushed it open and stumbled inside, trying as best she could to shake the snow from her shoes. It was cold inside as well, but thankfully no where near as cold as it had been outside. It was almost as quiet, but in here her footsteps clacked on the linoleum tile and echoed in the hall.

Vasilisa had only seen the school this empty once or twice. It was rather surreal. The last time she had been in this school was when she was eighteen and ready to graduate. She hadn't planned on seeing it again for the rest of her life, let alone a mere three years later. It looked pretty much the same. The linoleum was still blue and maroon, the walls were still greying white and speckled with thumbtack wounds. Even the posters - silly, inspirational things with catchy slogans - were still up. She recognized nearly all of them. The lockers were still blue and dented in places. The whole place was still cold and damp and still smelled of dish soap. There were no students and no sign that students studied there or had otherwise been in the school.

"Hello?" she called, again not really expecting anyone to answer. She had no idea why she kept asking.

Her radio, however, answered with a pop of static - she had almost forgotten about the thing. Last time it had sounded was when - oh, hell. She froze and cocked her rifle.

The moth-thing was back. She had killed it, no - a brother? Was it still alive? Its eyes, if it had them, were still covered up and it was grinning again, even more widely this time, opening its terrible jaws to swallow her up -

She fired, hitting it squarely in its bald white head. It bayed loudly like an injured dog and staggered back a few inches before toppling over backwards, and Vasilisa laughed. It was a nervous laugh, shaky and uncomfortably loud, but she laughed and laughed as she never had before. Relief, exhaustion - she knew she must have sounded crazy. She was pretty sure she was crazy. Before her eyes, the moth-thing twitched and was silent. She strode over to it and gave it a swift kick in the head. It stopped twitching but did not disappear as it had before. Maybe it couldn't if she was looking at it - thus she turned. When she turned back, the corpse was still there. Dammit. What was different this time?

When it was clear that it wouldn't fade or even get back up again, she sighed, realizing that she had been holding her breath. She ought to give it a name, she supposed. It was the least she could do - it hadn't tried to kill her, nor had the one before. But if she had given it the chance, would it have hurt her? Mora. That was its name. It was from a story that Yuri had told her a long time ago, a fairytale that had left her sleeping with the lights on for months. The Mora were moth-creatures that came in nightmares and sucked the life from sleeping people, or at least that was how he told the story. She remembered that, for about six months, she had to have him kill any moth that came within twelve feet of her. It was almost funny now. Almost.

Vasilisa kept walking, even though she didn't really have anywhere to go. It felt better than standing still and she wanted to get as far away from the Mora's corpse as possible.

Vasilisa had no idea what to do now. She was alone, lost in a strange, snowy in-between. Her father was gone - was all of this strange scenery connected to his disappearance? Surely there was someone else here! Someone also connected to her father (maybe?) or lost. Maybe he or she had willingly entered this place. How? Someone else -

_Cheryl_. The little girl had disappeared when Vasilisa had collapsed. She wasn't normal - maybe not real - but she hadn't crossed over to the snowy other-world. Maybe she had, she just had gone elsewhere by the time Vasilisa woke up. She knew something, Vasilisa was sure of it. Maybe Cheryl was dead. Silent Hill had lots of ghost stories and skeletons in its closet. Not that Vasilisa believed any of them, but a dead girl's ghost was about the most logical thing in this place. Cheryl. Had a girl named Cheryl ever died in Silent Hill? Weren't ghosts unquiet dead, as in those who had died violently and never had been properly put to rest? Hundreds had died terrible deaths in this town - mine accidents, car accidents, boat accidents, disease, suicide, murder. That's why there were so many stories. Who knew if one of the corpses had been named Cheryl?

Vasilisa stopped. Someone was walking around in a room upstairs; she could hear their clunking footsteps overhead. Probably a man, and almost certainly human. Oh, thank God, she thought. She wasn't completely alone. The room above her would be . . . 2H, if she remembered correctly. A science classroom. She tucked her gun behind a trash-bin on the first floor - didn't want to scare the poor man - and took the staircase up to the second. Yes, the room was 2H, and yes, it was a science classroom. Old Mrs. Brunswick had taught there but had retired the year after Vasilisa graduated, she heard. She didn't know who taught there now. The door was shut, but, as Vasilisa found out, unlocked. She pushed it open and was greeted with a shrill but undeniably male cry.


End file.
